Hanging by a Thread (22 page)

No, that was insane. I’d
know
. I’d know if he wasn’t who he said he was. If I couldn’t believe that, then I couldn’t believe anything at all. “It’s safe,” I said, thinking,
That’s all you need to know. Please don’t ask me to tell you any more. Don’t make me doubt you
.

He kissed me on the lips, so soft I almost didn’t feel it. “So what do we do now?”

Jack didn’t drive very fast down the fire road, the truck bouncing on the rutted dirt, but he made record time back to our neighborhood. Even so, it was very late, and when we pulled up in front of my house, I saw that all the lights were on inside.

Jack had said almost nothing on the way home, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I was working really hard to keep my doubts at bay, and Jack … Well, who knew what went on in his mind?

“Don’t get out, I’m good,” I said, figuring he hadn’t been planning to anyway. “Thank you so much. For, you know. Everything.” I opened the door, trying to keep things from being awkward, but I succeeded only in making everything feel more awkward, especially when he leaned across the seat and put his hand out to prevent me from shutting the door.

“Nothing to thank me for.”

Yeah, I got that. I was just making conversation
. “Are you going to the festival Wednesday?”

“Not sure.”

Of course he wasn’t sure. That was the thing about Jack, he was so hard to pin down. “Well, okay, I’ll probably be there, so if you go I might—”

“Clare,” he said, cutting me off. “Call me. Or I’ll call you. This doesn’t have to be hard.”

And with that, he pulled the door shut before I could think of anything to say in response. I listened to the sound of the truck disappearing slowly down the street as I walked up our steps and let myself in the front door.

The silence lasted only a fraction of a second.

“Clare!”

My mother came running from the living room, almost tripping over the soft brown afghan that she liked to drape over herself while watching television. Her face was swollen and her hair had come halfway out of its ponytail and was falling crazily into her face. She’d been crying, I realized with a shock.

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I know it’s late—”

She wrapped me into a fierce hug, her arms so tight around me I could barely breathe. “Oh my God, you have no idea how worried I’ve been—”

“I know, I know.”

“No. You
don’t
know.”

Her voice was ragged, and I looked at her sharply, noticing that the line between her eyebrows was etched with worry, that there were dark smudges under her eyes.

“Mom, I—”

“Clare, every night on the news they’ve been talking about what happened to those kids, about how they never caught the killer. I can’t lose you. I just can’t.”

“Mom, nothing’s going to happen to me, okay? I’m careful. I don’t—”

“You don’t
nothing
. You don’t know. You’re a child. I’m—I’ve seen more than you have. People can be ugly. They can be
bad
.”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m
not
a child anymore! Not like that, anyway. Did you think you could protect me just by telling me to stop reading clothes?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Her gaze snapped up at me, and I could see the fear as well as the anger in her expression.

“You can’t do it, so it scares you. That’s why you made Nana stop. That’s why you made me stop.” I was so angry, I couldn’t keep from blurting it out. “But guess what—it’s not that simple. Maybe we all can’t just turn it off.”

Mom drew in her breath sharply, her eyebrows lowering
angrily. “What did Nana tell you? She made a
promise
to me—”

“Yeah, for
you
. She did it for you, Mom! Do you have any idea how hard it is not to use the gift?”

Mom rolled her eyes.
“The gift,”
she repeated. “I suppose you got that from Nana too. How anyone could consider it a gift—it’s a curse, Clare, something I’ve wished a million times that she hadn’t passed along to you. I was spared, and I thought you would be too, but I guess she was right all along. Nana always said it was in our blood. I just never believed her. I never wanted to believe her.”

“You made
both
of us stop,” I whispered so angrily I could barely keep my voice steady. “First her, and then me. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, just that she made some mistake and you threatened never to speak to her again if she ever used the gift. Is that what you’re going to do to me too? Cut me off completely? Throw me out?”

“Oh my God, no, Clare,” my mother said, seeming to be genuinely horrified. “I would never do that, you have to believe—”

“Then how could you do it to
her
?”

“You don’t understand. That was different. She—she used it to hurt me.”

My mouth fell open. “Nana? Nana wanted to
hurt
you? I don’t believe you. You should see how she looks when she talks about you. It’s killing her, you have to—”

“You don’t know.”

“So tell me!”

Both of us were yelling, our voices echoing around our small living room. I hadn’t realized I was crying, but hot tears fell on my collarbone and Mom clutched the blanket so tightly that her knuckles were white.

“You want to know? Okay, maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s time you understand exactly what this so-called
gift
of yours can do. How it can destroy people. And families. I was still in high school when your grandmother promised she’d never use the gift again, but she broke her promise. When you were ten.”

The year we moved.

The year Dad left us.

“Oh, Clare … I’d always planned to tell you someday, but I just wanted you to be ready. To be a little older, so that you—”

“I’m old enough
now
.”

My mother sighed, rubbing her fingers along her temples. “We’d gone over to her house for a barbecue. Some of the neighbors were over. Your father and a couple of the other men were helping fix a trellis and you and I were helping in the kitchen … Anyway, your father got dirty and your grandmother gave him an old T-shirt to wear, promising to wash his shirt. I didn’t think anything of it. But the next week when she brought it back to me, all clean and folded …”

I almost asked her to stop. Because I knew, deep down, what was coming.

“She told me she couldn’t help it.” Mom’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She said when she touched it she felt … all
your father’s emotions … his discontent, how trapped he felt, how—how he wanted to escape, to be with … 
her
, with Renee.… She said I needed to know, so I could ‘make decisions.’ She meant so I could leave him, of course.”

“Oh, Mom …” My anger drained away instantly. My dad. Of course it had to do with my dad. The man who’d stuck around just long enough to make sure that when he left, he’d rip big enough holes to ruin both our lives. “I’m so sorry.”

I’d never known the exact story about Dad and Renee and how they ended up together. She’d been his assistant, that was all I knew. Mom had told me they’d started dating after the divorce, but he’d moved in with Renee shortly after he left us. And a few months after that he’d taken a job in Sacramento, where they bought a house together.

But I’d never come out and asked. I guess I hadn’t really wanted to know.

“Sorry.”
Mom laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Not as sorry as I was. After my mother told me I had no choice but to confront my husband about the affair he was having. So I did. And he didn’t even try to deny it. He never even asked me how I knew—that was how little he cared. He was gone a few days later.”

“But Mom—if he was that unhappy, he would have left anyway—”

“Not like
that
!” Now my mother was crying in earnest. “Not with me … humiliated … Straight into the arms of his
assistant
, of all the women in the world, that’s such a cliché, Clare, you don’t even understand.”

But I did understand.

I knew exactly how my mother felt: abandoned, tossed aside, unwanted. It was exactly how Dad had made me feel, too. But somehow, she didn’t see that we had that in common. In her mind, she was the only one who’d suffered from what he’d done.

“You can’t blame this on Nana,” I said. “All she did was tell you what he was already doing.”

“Don’t you get it, Clare? If your grandmother had kept it to herself—if she’d never gone looking into things that didn’t concern her—that affair would have burned itself out. Your father would have gotten it out of his system and we would have had some dignity.”

“Are you
kidding
me? Are we talking about the same guy? My dad, Joe Knight? The one who sent me a birthday card two months late? Oh, yeah, all he needed was a little time, right? And he would have been husband and father of the fucking
year
.”

“Clare!”

I had never talked to her like that before, but I wasn’t going to stop until I was through. “You put all this on Nana,” I said shakily, barely able to control my fury. “But it was never about her. It was
Dad’s
fault, not hers. You made us move, you turned your back on her … you even made it about
me
. Do you have any idea how—I thought I was a
freak
, Mom. All because you made the things I could do seem shameful. I’ve tried so hard to do what you wanted, to make you happy, but I’m not going to anymore.”

“Clare …”

“No.”
I jerked away from her. “No. I’m going to my room. I want to be by myself. You already ruined Nana’s life, I’m not going to let you ruin mine too. I am who I am, Mom, and you need to decide if you can love me this way or not. Or it won’t matter what else happens. You can’t make me safe by pretending I’m someone I’m not.”

I didn’t turn around as I ran for my room, slamming the door, but I could hear her sobbing even after I got into my bed and pulled the covers up over my head.

I
WOKE AROUND NINE THE NEXT
morning, groggy and disoriented. I lay in bed for a while thinking about Jack and Rachel and Amanda and Dillon, about the secrets simmering below the surface of the town as they prepared for tomorrow’s festival.

When I finally got up, Mom was gone, but the house smelled amazing. Wandering into the kitchen, I found a German apple pancake sitting on the stove, still warm. It was perfect, puffy and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It broke my heart, thinking of my mom rushing to make it for me before she went to work.

I knew that getting up early to bake was a kind of apology. I owed her an apology too, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I was still angry, but everything was muddy now, confusing and unclear. Yes, it was wrong of my mother to shift the blame to Nana for what my father did, but she was only human … heartbroken, left with a child to raise by herself, needing to make a living for us both.

It wasn’t until I’d poured myself a glass of juice that I noticed my mother had left something else for me. Neatly folded next to the coffee maker was a soft green shirt, with a note on top in my mother’s careful handwriting.

I unfolded the shirt. It was a simple style, with an Empire waistline gathered with tiny pin tucks. The neckline had been embellished with a trailing design of flowers and leaves in silk embroidery floss a shade lighter than the cotton fabric. The handwork was beautiful, French knots dotting the chain-stitch flowers, leaves in satin stitch. Nana had shown me how to do a few of these stitches when I was little, but my attempts had always been a mess.

I held the shirt up to my cheek. There was a faint spicy scent, as if it had been stored in a drawer with sachets.

I felt a wave of sadness for my mom. She had never been comfortable showing her emotions. Even now, when I knew she had to be lonely, she never talked about it. The stack of books on her nightstand grew, and she distracted herself with more work, but she needed friends.

I thought of Mrs. Stavros, alone with her grief and her drinking.

And I wondered: Could they help each other? Could my mother help her old friend move forward with her life?
I knew Mrs. Stavros would never get over the loss of her daughter, but maybe she could turn herself around enough to stop hiding in her own house, have some friends, maybe work. If her ex-husband was as rich as everyone said, she probably didn’t need the money, but if she didn’t do something she was going to waste away in her mansion.

Maybe getting back into her old life would be a good start for my mom. I could talk to Mrs. Stavros, maybe invite her over for coffee, tell my mom she was coming only when it was too late for her to cancel.

The day stretched out long and empty in front of me. I needed to call Rachel but I didn’t have the energy for that yet. And besides, she was busy getting ready to leave town later in the afternoon. With her gone, that would be one less person I needed to worry about tomorrow, on the actual anniversary.

The whole town was holding its breath, trying to get through the next forty-eight hours. The crazy thing was, there were no guarantees; even if nothing bad happened tomorrow, what about the day after that? And the one after that?